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School

University of British Columbia

Department

Psychology

Course

PSYC 101

Professor

Catherine( Cathy) Rankin

Semester

Winter

Description

– lecture 1
Habituation:
 Is the simplest form of learning
 Is learning not to respond to an unimportant event that occurs (for example, moving into a new
place and noticing all the little things (sounds, traffic etc) at first, but then getting used to it and
not responding to it)
 Non associative learning
Aplysia Californica (has 20,000 neurons): Kandell (spelling? Researcher)
 Slug like organism.
 Contracts its gill if it is touched. The animal responds less and less and less as you continue to
touch it. However if you wait a while and then touch it again, the aplysia reacts similarly to the
way it did the first time we touched it.
 Was used to test the effects of long term habituation and long term sensitization. Long term
habituations had less neurotransmitters and terminals in the neuron. More neurotransmitters
and terminals in the neuron with long term sensitization.
“Dishabituation” – example: being tricked into believing that there is a spider on your body by someone.
And then being overly conscious/sensitive to any stimulus received from that part of the body.
“Sensitization” – having a close call while driving a car. Your reflexes increase and you become much
more conscious and careful of your surroundings.
Caenorhabditis elegans (Brenner…researcher): extremely simple organism (302 neurons). Placed in an
agar plate (the one in BCIT). The worm moves forward direction, shock was applied to the agar and the
worm starts to move backwards. This backwards motion decreases as the shock is applied continually
(10 second intervals).
Shorter intervals (10 seconds): Rapid and complete habituation
Longer intervals (60 seconds): Shallower slope
The organisms with longer intervals recover faster than those from the ones with the shorter intervals.
- Different ISI’s (Interstimulus interval) recruit different cellular processes underlying habituation.
Strong correlation between the distance and duration of the tap withdrawal response. Not so much
between probability of reversal and the distance travelled.
Massed training: Lots of exposure in a short period of time. Show little or no change to memory.
Distributed training: Distributed exposure with breaks. Show greater memory!
GFP = green fluorescent protein - If a little child likes a book/movie, they love to watch it over and over and over repeatedly. They
love that they could predict what was going to happen in the scene/page.
Ivan Petrovi